Hi guys,

Previously, I had three 1TB drives in my desktop using the Intel's southbridge 
RAID for storage.  The only problem with that is every time Windows Vista took 
a dump, I would be in jeopardy of corrupting the storage space; thus, I decided 
to have a dedicated machine just for serving up files.

I now have a 3ware 9650SE 16 port host controller and currently four 2TB 
Western Digital WD2002FYPS drives (I also have a leftover drive from an old 
machine that's currently the boot drive), Supermicro server MB and a Celeron 
440 2GHz chip (primarly because it's 35watts and I wanted to minimize power 
usage when the machine sat idle).

I was weary about using a Microsoft OS as I wanted it to be reliable and also 
didn't want to have to pay for another license, etc.  I tried FreeNAS and it 
was ok, but somewhat limited in what you can do with it.  I have a squeezebox 
and would want to install their SqueezeCenter server to server up lossless 
compressed audio files.  I was also intrigued by ZFS after reading so much 
about it.

I did try around with creating a raidz1 zpool, but then learned that the 
current implementation is somewhat limited in that you can't expand the 
raidset.  Using a raidz storage pool would also not take advantage of the 
3ware's dedicated hardware for computing parity, etc.  Anyway, I successfully 
created a RAID5 set using three drives and created a zpool.  I then migrated 
the RAID5 set to add an additional 2TB drive (took 3 days!).  The server is 
currently down because I needed to use the RAM elsewhere, but after expanding 
the storage area, the filesystem still stayed the original size using the three 
2TB drives.  I tried finding a way to get the full space allocation, but it 
seems that many use simple SATA ports and the raidz solution.  I'm also a n00b, 
so any advice would be greatly appreciated.  If you think I'm going down the 
wrong path, I would like to hear it.

TIA,
Chester
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